Need some advice on VLANS

[tcassio]

Hello,
Our company is purchasing a Shoretel system. Our IT consultant recommended an Dell PowerConnect 3548P POE switch. We will be using 1 cat 5e cable for both telephone and pc connections. There is only 1 switch and our trunks are provided by a PRI T1, so we don't have a need for any WAN connections. He has never setup this switch for use with only 1 cable. I know we need to setup 2 VLANS. The data will be VLAN 10 with the IP scheme as 10.0.0.x. The voice will be VLAN 11 with the IP scheme as 10.0.11.x. I guess what I need is some direction to any kind of documentation that will aid in th programming of our POE switch. How much programming is involved. Our system will only have 30 sets.

Thanks for any help.
Tony

[cburgy]

The Dell 3548 is a Layer 2 switch, meaning that it can not do intervlan routing (which you'll need to use PCM on the computers).


Since you are looking for a low-cost solution (which is what Dell is), just buy a Procurve 2610-48PWR.

[Jason Learmouth]

Your assumption that you need to run VLANs because you want the computer to connect to the phones switch port is incorrect. It is not a technical requirement and since your switch won't make it easy I'd be pretty happy to run a single broadcast domain for your phones and computers, 30 of each is unlikely to be a big stress on the network...

I'm sure the purists on the forum with flame me for saying that, but the fact is that VLANing your phones is a technical decision not a technical requirement. If you don't have a compelling reason to decide in favour of VLANs then keep it simple.

[blanning]

I agree with Jason, VLANs are preferable, but with as few devices as you are talking about I do not think you will have quality problems. Just be sure to set an appropriate Diffserv code point for the ShoreTel and you should be golden.

[AlexandriaNetworks]

We have a cleint with 40 desktops, 7 servers and 40 ShoreTel phones running on a flat network. They all share the 192.168.0.X network and work just fine. There are no QOS issues or any dropping of calls, etc.

I agree with cburgy... get a HP ProCurve switch if you want to do VLANs. We installed a few HP 3500 YL Layer 3 switch at another client site and segmented the network. It works great and gigabit speeds are nice to have too.

[cburgy]

We have a cleint with 40 desktops, 7 servers and 40 ShoreTel phones running on a flat network. They all share the 192.168.0.X network and work just fine. There are no QOS issues or any dropping of calls, etc.

I agree with cburgy... get a HP ProCurve switch if you want to do VLANs. We installed a few HP 3500 YL Layer 3 switch at another client site and segmented the network. It works great and gigabit speeds are nice to have too.

By the way, if you implement a Procurve 3500 series, you are in the same price range as a Juniper EX3200 or a Brocade FWS series. You'll get a more feature rich product (true enterprise level switch) by implementing a Brocade or Juniper solution.

[tcassio]

I have a question pertaining to our Dell switch Model 3548 POE.
We have 2 vlans setup in the switch. 10.0.0.x and 10.0.11.x. The 10 vlan has our servers on it, and the 11 vlan has our voice and workstations on it. Everything works except I am not able to browse any of our servers that are on the 10 vlan from our workstations that are on the 11 vlan. I can ping across the vlans, I can map network drives to the server across vlans, I just can't browse.

Is there a setting in the switch that our IT consultant forgot to set, or is this a limitation of our switch???

Thanks,
Tony